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The History of Ressentiment in Iran and the Emerging Ressentiment-less Mindset

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Sina Mansouri-Zeyni  and
Sepideh Sami
Sina Mansouri-Zeyni
Affiliation:
Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran
Sepideh Sami
Affiliation:
Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran
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Abstract

Two dichotomies, one that resents the West and another that admires it, seem to have long polarized both Iranian intellectuals and the public imagination. Darioush Ashouri discusses this issue in terms of “ressentiment,” a term he borrows from Nietzsche. This study puts Ashouri's scattered views within a Nietzschean framework to form a coherent theory, and places it against the background of a brief history of ressentiment in Iran. It then argues that signs of a ressentiment-less young generation, mostly university students, seem to be appearing, and a certain kind of social behavior on Facebook and a work by the Iranian musician Mohsen Namjoo are analyzed as evidence of this emerging mindset.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 49 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2014

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Footnotes

We would like to thank Professor Farideh Pourgiv, Professor of English at Shiraz University (who for years has been as great a mentor as a professor) for her comments on this article.

References

1 Darioush Ashouri, “Hoshyari-e tarikhi: negareshi dar Qarbzadegi va mabani-ye nazari-ye an” [Historical Consciousness: A Look at Westoxication and its Theoretical Bases], http://ashouri.malakut.org/archives/upload/2005/03/ashouri-gharbzadegi.pdf. All the translations from Persian sources in this study are ours.

2 See Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography (New York, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boroujerdi, Mehrzad, Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (Syracuse, NY, 1996)Google Scholar; and Hamid Dabashi's statement of purpose in the preface to his Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundations of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York, 1993). It should be noted that this is not to claim that all these studies achieve is an evasion of this dualistic attitude; that would be an over-simplification. Rather, what is meant is that these studies, in their attempt to show that this attitude is more than a simple case of “either–or,” are for the first time aware of the attitude in question.

3 Dabashi, Hamid, The Green Movement in Iran, ed. Nikzadfar, Navid (New Brunswick, NJ and London, 2011), 45Google Scholar; Afshari, Reza, “A Historic Moment in Iran,” Human Rights Quarterly 31, no. 4 (November 2009): 839CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Soon after its release, this song became popular among a wide range of university students in Iran. Unfortunately, the current status of Namjoo in the Islamic Republic of Iran as a “heretic” does not allow any statistical research to be done to support the claim.

5 Al-e Ahmad, Jalal, Qarbzadegi [Westoxification] (Tehran, 1962)Google Scholar. All the translations are ours unless otherwise stated.

6 Ashouri, “Hoshyari-e tarikhi,” 14.

7 Darioush Ashouri, “Gofteman-e qarbzadegi: toqyan-e roshanfekri-e jahan-e sevvomi bara-ye bazgasht be ‘khod’” [The Discourse of Westoxication: The Third-World Rebellion for a Return to “Self”], http://ashouri.malakut.org/2009/09/post_63.html. Westoxication is Mehrzad Boroujerdi's coinage as equivalent to qarbzadegi or qarbshiftegi, which best renders the feelings of intoxication the term intends to convey. I have used West-aversion as equivalent to qarbsetizi or qarbgorizi, which describes the other pole's hatred for the West.

It should be noted that many, including Mirsepassi, argue that Fardid, Al-e Ahmad, and Shari'ati, who are consistently seen as intellectuals abhorring the West, had at the same time a latent fascination with the West (mostly through a Corbinian–Heideggerian dimension). However, this does not counter the present argument. Ali Mirsepassi, “Religious Intellectuals and Western Critiques of Secular Modernity,” Comparative Studies of South Asian, Africa and the Middle East 26, no. 3 (2006): 420.

8 Ashouri, “Gofteman-e qarbzadegi.”

9 Darioush Ashouri, “Transition from Orient to the Third World,” http://ashouri.malakut.org/2010/07/post_67.html.

10 Ibid.

11 Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran, 97. Tavakoli-Targhi himself cites Corbin, Henry, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi'ite Iran, trans. Pearson, Nancy, Bollingen Series xci: 2 (Princeton, New Jersey, 1977), 17–24Google Scholar.

12 Ashouri, “Transition from Orient to the Third World.”

13 Nietzsche, Friedrich, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Spiers, Ronald (Cambridge, 1999)Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., 146.

15 See Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G.E. (Oxford, 1963)Google Scholar, especially §§26–36 and 243–75.

16 See, respectively, Lyotard, Jean-François and Thébaud, Jean-Loup, Just Gaming, trans. Godzich, Wlad (Minneapolis, 1985)Google Scholar and Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Bennington, Geoff and Massumi, Brian (Minneapolis, 1984)Google Scholar.

17 See Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago and London, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially Chapters V and X.

18 See Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1973)Google Scholar.

19 See Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar, especially “The contingency of language.”

20 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will To Power, trans. Kaufmann, Walter and Hollingdale, R.J. (New York, 1968), 13Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., 4.

22 Ibid., 14.

23 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Hollingdale, R.J. (Harmondsworth, 1969), 85Google Scholar.

24 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans Hollingdale, R.J. (Harmondsworth, 1990), 195Google Scholar.

25 Nietzsche, The Will To Power, 15.

26 Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic, trans. Diethe, Carol (Cambridge, 2000), 21Google Scholar.

27 Ashouri, “Gofteman-e qarbzadegi.”

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Abrahamian, Ervand, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge, 2008), 8–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Ibid., 91.

32 Ibid., 73.

33 Ibid., 72–91.

34 Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran, 110.

35 Qtd. in Ashouri, “Gofteman-e Gharbzadegi”; Katouzian, Homa, “Khalil Maleki: The Odd Intellectual Out,” in Intellectual Trends in Twentieth-Century Iran: A Critical Survey, ed. Nabavi, Negin (Gainesville, Florida, 2003), 36Google Scholar.

36 Mirsepassi, “Religious Intellectuals and Western Critiques of Secular Modernity,” 420.

37 For a discussion of Iranian nativism, see, Boroujerdi, Iranian Intellectuals and the West.

38 Shayegan, Dariush, Asia dar barabar-e qarb [Asia vis-à-vis the West] (Tehran, 2003)Google Scholar.

39 Shayegan, Dariush, Qu'est-ce qu'une révolution religieuse? [What is a Religious Revolution?] (Paris, 1982)Google Scholar; Shayegan, Dariush, Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West, trans. Howe, John (London, 1992)Google Scholar.

40 Farhangestan-e zaban va adab-e farsi, Osul va zavabet-e vazhegozini [The Principles and Rules of Word Replacement], 3rd ed., http://www.persianacademy.ir/userfiles/file/osoul/310488.pdf, 7.

41 It is important, we believe, to note the falsity of the belief that an Arabic-derived word can be considered as actually Arabic—in post-Saussurean times that would be an egregious fallacy. In the context of Saussure's linguistics and Wittgenstein's philosophy, and indeed that of almost all post-structuralists, it can be convincingly argued that these words have now Persian identities, and that all that can be justly said is that they were originally derived from Arabic.

42 Fanon, Franz, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth, 1964)Google Scholar, and Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1993)Google Scholar. For a discussion of nativism in Iran, see Boroujerdi, Iranian Intellectuals and the West.

43 Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran, 22.

44 Ibid., 99.

45 Katouzian, “Khalil Maleki,” 33.

46 Ibid., 28.

47 Ibid., 35.

48 See note 3. As for the Facebook pages, one of them (namely biaid) enjoys, as of this article, 9,400 followers, of whom more than 80 percent are students at high-ranking universities within Iran. This is a significant number if compared to Kurosh-e Kabir, to use an example that is related to the resentful pole that cherishes the national heritage (Kurosh-e Kabir). The latter has 12,000 followers, only a small portion of whom are students at elite universities. https://www.facebook.com/pages/?fref=ts. .

49 See Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/BIAEED and https://www.facebook.com/Prhesabimemories.

50 For a recent and rare discussion of the international status of Hesabi, see Interview with Zia Movahed, http://www.asriran.com/fa/news/242085. Movahed argues that Hesabi was nothing more than an average professor, who did not even publish any important articles. The occurrence of such an interview shows the predominance of reverential stories about Hesabi.

51 Hesabi, Iraj, Ostad-e eshq [The Master of Love] (Tehran, 2011)Google Scholar. The inquiry into the validity of the stories in The Master of Love is beyond the scope of the present study. As a matter of fact, their validity is not the most important point since it is the people's attitude to have uncritically believed them that is relevant here. This study does not level any charge against The Master of Love.

52 Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=512992912060405&set=o.125128144253558&type=1&relevant_count=1#!/photo.php?fbid=512992912060405&set=o.125128144253558&type=1&permPage=1.

53 Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), 87–8Google Scholar.

54 Ibid., 86.

55 Namjoo, Mohsen, Alaki, CD. Stanford, CA, 2011Google Scholar.

56 Farhat, Hormoz, Dastgah in Iranian Music, trans. Purmohammad, Mahdi (Tehran, 2007), 71Google Scholar. The Figure has been simplified to avoid complication.